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The hand of an exploded astronaut takes on a life of its own. Near a spacecraft crash site, a naive young med student discovers a disembodied hand and takes it home as a grisly souvenir. He is not aware that the hand is possessed by a strange, murderous alien who gradually begins to take over the hapless med student. One by one, townsfolk are found mysteriously strangled to death. In the end, a heroic and hungry cat saves the rest of the town.

The Crawling Hand was featured in Episode 6 of Season 1 of the TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000. This episode was released on VHS by Rhino Home Video in October 1999 and on DVD in June 2002, including the uncut film as a bonus feature.

Rick Moody's novel The Four Fingers of Death, released in July 2010 by Little, Brown and Company, is a metafictional novelization of a 2025 remake of The Crawling Hand (which means that Moody's fictional 'novelization' is set in a future very different from that of the 1963 film).[8]